Microsoft Build 2023: Artificial intelligence redefines the future of software development and work

2023 is a key year for the acceleration of AI transformation: Microsoft announced its expansion of cooperation with OpenAI, and has successively launched Azure OpenAI enterprise-level services and a series of "smart copilots" for products and services such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, etc. The "intelligent co-pilot" can realize human-computer interaction based on natural language understanding and generation through large language models (LLM), and help users complete various complex tasks. It not only opens up a new type of software powered by AI, but also marks a major change in software development methods - from the application scenarios, user experience, service architecture to security protection measures of software services, they are all evolving into a development experience that is completely different from the past. Among them, "plugin" is a key link in AI application development. Real-time information or business data from other software services are introduced through the API interface. "plugin" can add new computing power to the AI ​​system, thereby providing users with a variety of rich, efficient and accurate generative intelligent services.

Microsoft announced the adoption of the same open plug-in (Plugin) standard as OpenAI ChatGPT, thereby ensuring the interoperability between ChatGPT and a series of Microsoft's "smart co-pilot" product services in the future. The plug-ins developed by developers using either platform are suitable for ChatGPT and Microsoft's Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 Copilot and other services to meet the business needs of individual and commercial customers. AI applications developed by developers on Azure OpenAI Enterprise Services also support the same open plug-in standard by default—which means that any developer can choose to interact with human natural language as a way of interacting with their software.

Microsoft announced that developers can connect applications and services to Microsoft 365 Copilot through "plug-ins". The first batch of supported plug-ins include ChatGPT, Teams information extension, Power Platform connector, etc. Developers can directly access existing services or use Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Teams Toolkit development tools on Visual Studio to easily develop new Microsoft 365 Copilot plug-ins. Developers can also import data into Microsoft Graph to build correlation and action information through the recently released Semantic Index for Copilot semantic index function, thereby further expanding the functions of Microsoft 365 Copilot. During the public beta period, more than 50 plug-ins will be provided from Atlassian, Adobe, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters, Moveworks, Mural and other partners. When Microsoft 365 Copilot is officially released, thousands of plug-ins will be available.

Power Pages, the important components of the Power Platform platform, and the Copilot intelligent co-pilot in Power BI, enable public previews, allowing users to create web pages and data insights more easily through natural language. In addition, the generative intelligence in Power Virtual Agent will also enable invite previews, further enhancing the experience of building conversational robots and adding more customization possibilities to Power Automate.

New Azure AI Tool: Helps developers responsibly build, operate and deploy new generations of AI applications

Azure OpenAI Enterprise Edition service integrates advanced models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 with Azure's secure and reliable enterprise-level services. Currently, more than 4,500 enterprise customers have adopted Azure OpenAI services. As Microsoft continues to integrate generative intelligence into more first-party products and services, more and more developers will begin to develop their own new generation of intelligent applications in the form of "smart co-pilot".

At the Build 2023 conference, Microsoft launched a series of AI development tools and features to help developers accelerate their transformation, including: the newly released Azure AI Studio, which can help developers more easily integrate external data sources into Azure OpenAI services, thereby training a conversation model based on their own data. The newly released preview Azure AI Content Safety helps developers build safer online environments and communities, with built-in models that detect inappropriate content in text or images and notify human supervisors to take action. This feature, originally used for Microsoft services such as GitHub Copilot, will be built into Azure OpenAI Enterprise Edition services to third-party developers, thereby generating smart content responsibly. Microsoft has also released the new Azure Machine Learning tool, including Responsible AI dashboard support for text and image data. In the public preview, this feature allows developers to evaluate large models built using unstructured data during the construction, training, or evaluation of models. This will help developers discover model errors, fairness issues, and model interpretation before deploying the model, enabling a more fair and high-performance computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) model. Azure Machine Learning prompt flow allows developers to efficiently build prompt words with popular open source prompt word arrangement solutions such as Semantic Kernel. In the upcoming preview, propt flow provides developers with easier and easier ways to prompt, evaluate and adjust large models. Developers can quickly create prompt workflows connected to various language models and data sources, and evaluate the quality of the workflow through authenticity and other means, so as to select the best prompts for them based on actual conditions. Prompt flow also integrates Azure AI Content Safety to help developers detect and delete harmful content in their workflows. In addition, Microsoft has announced that it will add new media source capabilities to Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator in the coming months. This technology uses encryption methods to tag and sign content generated by AI, which contains metadata about its origin, helping developers verify whether images or videos are generated by AI.

Microsoft Dev Box, which will be officially commercialized in July, is an Azure development service designed to provide developers with pre-configured, centrally managed, project-based ready-to-use development boxes. Dev Box received positive feedback from customers during the preview stage, and more than 9,500 developers are used in daily development within Microsoft. Microsoft Dev Box adds multiple new features to optimize the development experience and improve work efficiency, including supporting customization in code settings, providing more preset images for customization in Azure Marketplace to meet different development needs, and developers can also manage and customize the development environment through the newly launched portal Azure Deployment Environments.

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps enables public previews for all users. This security service integrates with Azure Repos and Azure Pipelines. It provides the same secret scanning, dependency scanning and CodeQL code scanning as GitHub Enterprise Edition to help developers prevent and eliminate potential security risks.

Microsoft is committed to working with partners such as NVIDIA to accelerate the development of an artificial intelligence-driven future, allowing organizations to design, develop, deploy and manage Azure-based applications that are scaled and secure, ultimately benefit customers. By integrating Nvidia AI Enterprise Integration with Azure Machine Learning, Nvidia will accelerate the development of generative AI available to enterprises. Omniverse Cloud, unique in Azure, can help organizations aggregate data into a large number of high-performance models, connect their domain-specific software tools, and enable multi-user real-time collaboration across multiple locations. Nvidia GPUs will support accelerated AI model applications without the need to be proficient in hardware knowledge.

Microsoft Fabric builds a unified one-stop analytics platform

In this new era redefined by intelligent innovation, the continuous production of various data from different devices, applications, and interactions has become more important than before. Especially for enterprises and organizations, it is essential to obtain truly useful intelligence, orderly managed, stable and clean data flows, and a highly unified data analysis system.

The newly released Microsoft Fabric is a unified one-stop analytics platform that integrates data engineering, data integration, data storage, data science, real-time analytics, application observability and business intelligence services, all connected to a data warehouse called OneLake. Microsoft Fabric is fully integrated into Azure OpenAI services and provides "Copilot" in various data-related operation experiences. Therefore, users of different technical levels can perform their operations and gain intuitive insights through natural language dialogue, such as creating data streams and data pipelines, generating code and complete functions, building machine learning models, or expressing the results in a visual form. Users can even integrate their unique data experience with the combination of Azure OpenAI model and own data into a new plug-in for public release.

Windows enables a new experience in intelligent development

Windows Smart Co-pilot is the first centralized AI assistant on the personal computer platform. With the help of various integrated first-party and third-party plug-ins, users will no longer need to spend time and energy on finding different applications and switching back and forth between various software, but will truly focus on how to show their creativity, complete complex tasks, or communicate and collaborate. Windows Smart Co-pilot can float on different applications and windows in the form of a sidebar. It not only supports daily operations such as copy and paste, screenshot and cutting, but also can complete searches and various complex operations in the form of natural language dialogue at any time. The Windows Smart Co-driver Preview Edition will be launched on Windows 11 starting from June.

Windows 11 has accelerated its popularity in the past year, and even the monthly active users of developers using Windows 11 devices have increased by 24% annually. The Dev Home, which has now been previewed, will create a more complete development environment and development experience for Windows developers. Dev Home allows easy connection and setting up GitHub and cloud development environments such as Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Codespaces, and provides open source and fully expanded development tools, including customizable dashboards and various tools to fully optimize the development experience.

The Edge browser supports Microsoft 365 Smart Co-driver plug-in and has updated a more Windows 11-style appearance design. Edge for Business Business browser supports more enterprise management, security, privacy and productivity features to better meet the needs of hybrid offices. The version for hosted devices is now available for preview and the unmanaged version will be available in the coming months. In addition, Edge Workspaces, which supports multi-user collaborative work, will also end preview within a few months and launch a formal commercial version.